The solution in Vilnius -- and "a REALLY efficient way of killing locally owned restaurants."

Close the streets and let us spill out onto them. Get those cars the hell out of the way. Governor Holcomb may wish to keep those alcohol rules relaxed for a great deal longer.

Lithuanian capital to be turned into vast open-air cafe, by Jon Henley (The Guardian)

Vilnius gives public space to bars and cafes to allow physical distancing during lockdown

Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, has announced plans to turn the city into a vast open-air cafe by giving over much of its public space to hard-hit bar and restaurant owners so they can put their tables outdoors and still observe physical distancing rules.

The Baltic state, which has recorded 1,344 cases of the coronavirus and 44 deaths, allowed cafes and restaurants with outdoor seating, hairdressers and almost all shops to begin reopening this week as part of a staged exit from lockdown.

But the health ministry has imposed strict physical distancing rules and safety measures. Shops must limit the number of customers at one time, masks will remain mandatory in all public spaces, and cafe and restaurant tables have to be placed at least two metres apart.

That posed a problem for many restaurateurs in Vilnius old town, Senamiestis, a Unesco-listed world heritage site whose narrow streets make it almost impossible to place more than a couple of tables outside – prompting the mayor’s offer.

“Plazas, squares, streets – nearby cafes will be allowed to set up outdoor tables free of charge this season and thus conduct their activities during quarantine,” said Remigijus Šimašius. Public safety remained the city’s top priority, the mayor said, but the measure should help cafes to “open up, work, retain jobs and keep Vilnius alive”.

The preceding is the appetizer. Here's the main course; dessert can be the beer or bourbon of your choice (dutch treat, natch). Maybe just another Twitter tweeter, but with an exceedingly clear explanation of where we stand in the indie restaurant biz, and where we may or may not be going. I've combined her 12 tweets into a readable whole.

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As someone who grew up in the restaurant industry (my dad managed locally owned restaurants for 40+ years), forcing restaurants to reopen with limited capacity for social distancing purposes is a REALLY efficient way of killing locally owned restaurants.

And when I say forcing here, what I mean is that if a state/municipality lifts the portion of the stay at home order that has been affecting restaurants and instituting these rules, they take away the restaurant's leverage to negotiate with landlords/creditors/etc.

Or to pursue any form of grants/SBAs/PPP funding to try to retain or pay staff during this. So they don't really have any choice but to reopen.

BUT, even at the best of times, restaurants run on helluva tight margins. They count on mostly full houses to pay bills -- bills like rent, utilities, insurance, suppliers (food/liquor/linens/paper goods/cleaning products), salaries, and taxes.

A slow couple of weeks of the house being less than full means some or those bills might not get paid. Too many weeks and restaurants fold.

So when you tell restaurants to reopen at diminished capacity, you're taking the legs out from under them, and even if they can hope to stay afloat, you're also asking them to create systems for dealing with that limited capacity from whole cloth.

Let's say Mom & Pop's place has a normal capacity of 30, but now they can seat 25% of that. That's 7 people. Maybe 2 tables. Who gets those two tables? You probably can't have people sitting around waiting for them.

So is everything reservation only now?

Anyone who has hostessed somewhere with reservations can tell you what a nightmare they often are. You take them assuming people will only be there a certain amount of time and they stay too long. Or have more in their party. Or they no show.

But if you can't have people trying to do walk ins, how else can you do it with appropriate social distancing? So you take reservations and tell people they have strict time limits? Then if they're staying too long, you force them out?

They'll take that out on servers.

In A LOT of these states, those servers are making $2.15 an hour plus tips. So if the servers have to rush people through meals to get tables turned to try to get the meal counts to make this remotely viable for the restaurant, their tips are going to suffer.

That will get passed back up to the restaurant who will then have to make up the difference up to minimum wage. To do that and have any possible hope of staying afloat, you're probably looking at menu prices going up.

Add in the idea that Americans who have been out of work for the last two months aren't all going to have the money to go rushing back out to eat, and this whole thing is a going to push a LOT of local restaurants to the tipping point.

(And possibly some large corporate chains, given the way some of them have also been struggling, but my experience is primarily in locally owned restaurants).

If you want to KILL small restaurant and bar businesses, this is how you do it.

30 years ago today: From Vilnius to Warsaw with the Greimans.

Previously: 30 years ago today: The drinking lamp is lit in Riga and Vilnius.

The funny thing about this human experience is the notion that we’re obliged to keep “civilization” rolling, when at some point we won’t be around to see how it all plays out.

Spoiler alert: There aren’t any endings except your own, and even if there are, it’ll be biology making the final call.

An ending was planned for SSTS Tour S-819, and it would be in Poland. We departed Vilnius at 12:05 p.m. on July 8, 1987, bound for Warsaw by rail.

But would there be an end to communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe? At the time, it didn’t seem so.

The opposing -isms seemed locked firmly into place. Ordinary citizens in the Bloc went about their business, just like us. The majority kept their heads down, worked their jobs and raised their families. They made do, and the system survived.

However, we were about to experience palpable ferment in Poland. By 1987, Solidarność (Solidarity) had become more than your dziadeka's* trade union, and a shift was underway.

In the 1980s, Solidarity was a broad anti-bureaucratic social movement, using the methods of civil resistance to advance the causes of workers' rights and social change. The government attempted to destroy the union by imposing martial law in Poland, which lasted from December 1981 to July 1983 and was followed by several years of political repression from 8 October 1982, but in the end it was forced to negotiate with Solidarity. In the union's clandestine years, the Pope and the United States provided significant financial support, estimated to be as much as 50 million US dollars.

Solidarity’s leader and shipyard electrician Lech Walesa surely was the most popular Pole still living in Poland, although first place overall went to a fellow from Wadowice in residence at the Vatican by the name of Karol Józef Wojtyła -- Pope John Paul II.

After World War II, Poland relinquished territories to the Soviet Union in the east and absorbed former German lands in the west. Ethnic Poles arrived from one side, and Germans were expelled from the other. The Jewish population obviously was no more.

After the war, the vast statistical majority of people in Poland identified as Poles, and were staunchly Roman Catholic. Communism in Poland utterly failed to create a New Polish Man (or Woman); the countryside successfully resisted collectivization, and the factory workers took their “leading roles” literally, not with the usual grain of symbolism, whether implied or imposed.

It made for a certain conformity to tradition, and as a result, an accompanying rebelliousness. Poland was a headache for the Kremlin throughout the Cold War, and America was happy to exploit the situation whenever possible.

Consequently, by 1987 arguably the third most popular Pole was from a small town in Illinois by way of Hollywood, as explained by a native during our stint in Warsaw.

“There is only one place in the world where your Mr. Reagan would have received more votes (than in 1984),” the man told us, gesturing to the surrounding urban landscape.

“Here, in Poland.”

It may have seemed as though communism wouldn’t end, and yet all around us there were cracks and fissures, albeit not always evident to short-term foreigners. Ironically, whether wittingly or otherwise, yet another outsider was trying to ride the tiger while rewriting the big rule book, ultimately helping to enable the collapse of the very edifice he sought to reform.

His name was Mikhail Gorbachev, and he lived in Moscow.

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Our group already had done the USSR, and visited Gorby’s pad, otherwise known as the Kremlin. We’d black marketed, eaten caviar, raised Nick’s flag above our Leningrad hotel, watched Orthodox priests swing their censers, patronized the V.I. Lenin Memorial Shithouse and done push-ups with a Latvian student group, as led en masse by Mette the most badass ever Danish bartenderess.

Oceans of alcoholic beverages had eased the passage, and a few rivulets remained to be consumed as the train left Vilnius for what proved to be a grueling 9-hour trip on the single hottest day of the summer to date, all windows open though to little avail.

Upon arriving at the border, there were the customary bureaucratic unpleasantries, as well as the requisite bogie exchange, as described previously.

The primary reason our border stop lasted so long was the need for something called a bogie exchange. It had nothing to do with Casablanca or Lauren Bacall. Simply stated, the standard Soviet rail gauge is wider than the gauge used in both Eastern and Western Europe (with the exception of Spain and Portugal).

So it was that for a solid two hours, as wheels were exchanged and passports stamped, the train sat motionless at a scorched agricultural plain of a border crossing, with visibly wilting greenish-brown crops stretching to the horizon, and a town nestled atop a low hill, perhaps a few hundred yards away.

Most of us remained on the train, except for the two friends from Los Angeles – quiet, laid-back and West Coast hip. They spied the town, briefly conferred and made for it, returning 45 minutes later, their bags stuffed with non-resealable bottles of clear liquid with tiny paper labels.

I didn’t need to ask.

Just then, as we congregated in the corridor to begin passing the bottles, an elderly shirtless man was spotted striding in our direction. It was Mr. Greiman, and therein lies a story.

If memory serves, Mr. and Mrs. Greiman lived in Australia, where they had moved after escaping war-torn Eastern Europe during or soon after WWII. They'd seen bad things, and hadn't forgotten them.

The Greimans were in their late sixties, and had joined the youth and student tour for the sole reason that doing so enabled them to obtain the necessary visas to visit relatives in either Latvia or Lithuania (it’s hazy), with whom they hadn’t met in decades owing to the Iron Curtain.

It is a matter of significant regret that I failed to appreciate the unique position of the Greimans, whose lives and experiences were the polar opposite of the boisterous band of party-hardy Anglo collegiate types comprising the remainder of the group.

By contrast, Mr. Greiman's persistently annoyed mantra was “get off my lawn.” I’m guessing he had justification, and that I might have learned a lot from him by giving a little and perhaps staying sober for an evening, but I didn’t.

It was my loss.

Now Mr. Greiman was lurching toward us down the sweltering rail corridor, torso fully exposed, and wild eyes fixed on the first open bottle. He fairly snatched it from one of the Los Angeleno’s, while mumbling please and thanks at once, hurriedly lifting it to his lips and drinking – gulping – deeply of what he apparently thought was mineral water.

Luckily the window was down, and adjacent weeds along the track duly received a tremendous Greiman vodka shower. I don’t recall seeing the Greimans again after this episode, but I’ve always hoped they got what they needed from the trip in spite of the impediments of nearby youth.

It’s strange what you remember, and what you don’t. The train came to a stop in Warsaw well after 9:00 p.m., and we congregated on the plaza in front, waiting for our guide and the bus to the Hotel Nowa Praga.

There was a women dressed in peasant garb, standing behind a rickety wooden table by a shoddy cement wall. She was selling admirably healthy strawberries, and none of us had Polish złoty to spend on her wares.

Barrie didn’t ruminate. Taking stock of the situation, he produced a few dollar bills that she happily accepted as illegal tender in honor of the wonderful Mr. Reagan, depleting her stock to nothing.

Then Barrie grandly announced the reason for her bountiful crop: Undoubtedly these were Chernobyl strawberries, fertilized with the fallout from the nuclear disaster the previous year.

We ate the nuclear strawberries, each and everyone, laughing all the way to the hotel.

Next: Our dinner with Andrej on a surreal evening in Krakow.

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* grandfather's, in Polish

30 years ago today: The drinking lamp is lit in Riga and Vilnius.

Previously: 30 years ago today: Queuing for kvass (an aside).

In Riga, we happened upon a collection of ridiculously youthful soldiers and photographed them being photographed.

In 1987, theoretically, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics operated just as the name implies, as a voluntarily linked union of constituent republics.

The Republics of the Soviet Union or the Union Republics (Russian: союзные республики, soyuznye respubliki) of the Soviet Union were ethnically based proto-states that were subordinated directly to the Government of the Soviet Union ...

... In the final decades of its existence, the Soviet Union officially consisted of fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs).

In 1991, this theory was proved to be rubbish; when central authority dissolved, the republics hit the road as fast as their declarations of independence would allow them.

Our tour group's next two destinations were Riga and Vilnius, the capital cities of Latvia and Lithuania, which were SSRs -- except in 1987, it wasn't that simple. In fact, it was very complicated.

However, most of the international community did not consider the Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) to have legitimately been part of the USSR. The Baltic states assert(ed) that their incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1940 (as the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian SSRs) under the provisions of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was illegal, and that they therefore remained independent countries under Soviet occupation.

This persistent legal position on the part of the three Baltic Republics, which are culturally distinct and speak different languages, finally bore fruit when the USSR collapsed.

Until this happened, naked Kremlin power trumped their claims, and these countries were subject to direct (and oppressive) Soviet rule for a half-century, unlike the indirect control exerted on Eastern European "buffer" states like Hungary and Czechoslovakia -- both of which the USSR invaded when indirect means weren't sufficient.

To dilute ethnic and cultural homogeneity in the Baltic Republics, there was ethnic cleansing following the war. The Red Army sent remaining Germans (and Poles) west; of course the Jewish population had been decimated. Ethnic Russians were moved in, and their presence remains an issue today.

Overall, it made for delicate interplay with our Latvian and Lithuanian guides, and those local students with whom we met according to the usual regimented "official" program. They were carefully screened and expected to toe the literal party line, though in private, discrete opinions at times might be voiced. Beer was found to assist candor.

Our short tour schedule in Latvia and Lithuania went like this:

Saturday 4 July
Evening flight from Leningrad to Riga, overnight in Riga

Sunday 5 July
Overnight in Riga

Monday 6 July
Riga, with a daytime train ride to Vilnius (overnight in Vilnius)

Tuesday 7 July
All day and overnight in Vilnius

Wednesday 8 July
All-day train ride from Vilnius to Warsaw, Poland

That's a lot of movement, and the party schedule escalated; Latvia and Lithuania are traditional beer-drinking countries, and the Beriozka shops were well-stocked with Carlsberg and Pilsner Urquell. There was local beer, but at this point it became easier to be foreigners.

I regret this. So it goes.

Riga is a venerable Hanseatic port city, and the "old" architecture noticeably characteristic of the Baltic Sea and northerly climes.

The Hotel Daugava in Riga had seen better days, and was barely functional. However, our multi-bed room had a balcony, even if the plumbing worked only sporadically. We created a plaque from cardboard and magic marker, dubbing the bathroom the "V. I. Lenin Memorial Shithouse."

Two nights in Riga, two nights in Vilnius, and the drinking spiraled completely out of control. The like-minded had long since coalesced, and as noted, alcohol was cheap and easy. The next few photos were taken by Kim Wiesener, our group leader, who graciously agreed to spiral with us.

This photo always makes me smile. Barrie and I excepted, these seven people hadn't known each other ten days earlier. 30 years on, I've managed to account for all but two of them.

It will be noted that I'm wearing the same shirt in each photo. The photos were taken at different parties in Riga and Vilnius.

There's an explanation, and it's actually true.

I'd been on the road for two months when I met the tour group, subsisting on not too many clothes, washed as often as possible with Woolite, and dried by the sun.

Barrie packed a huge military surplus duffel bag with surplus wearables, determined to do as little laundry as possible by trashing his dirty clothes. He'd been working at a fast food taco franchise called Zantigo, and had brought numerous t-shirts.

As he trashed them, I grabbed a couple; washed and dried, they were a bit large on me at the time, but I was happy to have something different to wear.

I did not attempt to rescue his used underwear.

The clock tower in Vilnius (above) reads "peace" in Russian, not Lithuanian. Below, also in Vilnius, Barrie hoists another case of Carlsberg to the Hotel Narutis.

Next: The legendary train ride from Vilnius to Warsaw, and the Greimans.